THE MOST IMPORTANT ELECTION STORY

OKAY, here's the most important election story out there right now. You may be aware that many states are switching over to electronic ballot machines. Contrary to what many believe, these machines are not even close to 100% trustworthy. Think about how often your computer crashes on you. If you're on a Windows machine, you know it happens more than you'd like it to. Well, guess what--a bunch of these electronic ballot machines are based on the same software as your Windows machine. But even if they weren't, no computer is safe from SOME kind of hacking. There are a huge number of ways that a computerized ballot machine can be hacked. Some quick ways to learn about the myriad problems with electronic/computerized ballot machines is by checking out both BlackBoxVoting.Com and BlackBoxVoting.Org (they're different sites).

In the meantime, it's important for you to know how what you should do if your polling place has electronic ballot boxes set up for you to vote on. Now, I'm still doing some research, but thanks to great work from Lisa Rein, I can at least tell Californians what to do if they want to avoid the machines. The following clip is from a post at Lisa's site:

We need your help. California voters who are worried about electronic voting machines have an option to vote on paper this year. We worked very hard to get this from the Secretary of State and it was a major victory -- he was sued over it and won in federal court.

Now we've learned that several of the larger counties (including Alameda, Santa Clara and Riverside) have instructed their pollworkers that they cannot tell voters about this choice. They must steer voters to the insecure machines and can only offer paper if a voter affirmatively chooses it.

Needless to say, this is outrageous. To try to raise voter awareness of the choice (and hopefully shame the registrars of voters to change their minds), we've thrown together a website:


http://www.paperorplastic2004.org

Please take a look and send the link on to your friends, family and other voters in the 11 affected counties (the list is on the website). We have very little time to get the word out, and I'm hoping that we can spread this far and wide and hopefully even provoke a little media coverage as well.

In short, if you don't want to use an E-Voting machine, you don't have to. Just ask for paper and be sure to tell your friends and family that they don't have to use an E-Voting machine if they don't want to.

The thing that concerns me is that in LA county, where I'll be voting along with millions of others, they're using these "Inkavote" machines. If you remember Scantron tests from when you were a kid, they're similar. They get run through a machine--now, maybe I'm too used to voting with chads over the last ten years, but that's the way I prefer. I don't like the idea of my ballot being run through any kind of machine. Maybe the old punchcard/chad cards got run through a machine, I'm not sure.

Either way, I really wish we could just fall back to the old skool paper ballots. I know that even that system can be fixed, but it's a LOT harder to do it with paper ballots than with computers. Computers make EVERYTHING easier--including fixing elections.

But don't take my word for it, please follow the links above. You can also check out my previous blog entry on this issue, Electronic Ballot Boxes Safe, Says Right-Leaning, Clue-Free "Scholar". In that blog entry, I disect a conservative viewpoint of the security of electronic ballot boxes so you get to hear "their" argument and then mine.